NOT YET A SCIENCE but a proposition: That certain problems in linguistics
might be solved by viewing language as a complex dynamical system or "Chaos
field."

Of all the responses to Saussure's linguistics, two have special interest
here: the first, "antilinguistics," can be traced--in the modern period--from
Rimbaud's departure for Abyssinia; to Nietzsche's "I fear that while we
still have grammar we have not yet killed God"; to dada; to Korzybski's
"the Map is not the Territory"; to Burroughs' cut-ups and "breakthrough
in the Gray Room"; to Zerzan's attack on language itself as representation
and mediation.

The second, Chomskyan Linguistics, with its belief in "universal grammar"
and its tree diagrams, represents (I believe) an attempt to "save" language
by discovering "hidden invariables," much in the same way certain scientists
are trying to "save" physics from the "irrationality" of quantum mechanics.
Although as an anarchist Chomsky might have been expected to side with the
nihilists, in fact his beautiful theory has more in common with platonism
or sufism than with anarchism. Traditional metaphysics describes language
as pure light shining through the colored glass of the archetypes; Chomsky
speaks of "innate" grammars. Words are leaves, branches are sentences, mother
tongues are limbs, language families are trunks, and the roots are in "heaven"...or
the DNA. I call this "hermetalinguistics"--hermetic and metaphysical. Nihilism
(or "HeavyMetalinguistics" in honor of Burroughs) seems to me to have brought
language to a dead end and threatened to render it "impossible" (a great
feat, but a depressing one)- -while Chomsky holds out the promise and hope
of a last- minute revelation, which I find equally difficult to accept.
I too would like to "save" language, but without recourse to any "Spooks,"
or supposed rules about God, dice, and the Universe.

Returning to Saussure, and his posthumously published notes on anagrams
in Latin poetry, we find certain hints of a process which somehow escapes
the sign/signifier dynamic. Saussure was confronted with the suggestion
of some sort of "meta"-linguistics which happens within language rather than being imposed as a categorical imperative from "outside."
As soon as language begins to play, as in the acrostic poems he examined,
it seems to resonate with self- amplifying complexity. Saussure tried to
quantify the anagrams but his figures kept running away from him (as if
perhaps nonlinear equations were involved). Also, he began to find the anagrams everywhere, even in Latin prose. He began to wonder if he were hallucinating--or if
anagrams were a natural unconscious process of parole. He abandoned the project.

I wonder: if enough of this sort of data were crunched through a computer,
would we begin to be able to model language in terms of complex dynamical
systems? Grammars then would not be "innate," but would emerge from chaos
as spontaneously evolving "higher orders," in Prigogine's sense of "creative
evolution." Grammars could be thought of as "Strange Attractors," like the
hidden pattern which "caused" the anagrams--patterns which are "real" but
have "existence" only in terms of the sub-patterns they manifest. If meaning is elusive, perhaps it is because consciousness itself, and therefore language,
is fractal.

I find this theory more satisfyingly anarchistic than either anti-linguistics
or Chomskyanism. It suggests that language can overcome representation and
mediation, not because it is innate, but because it is chaos. It would suggest that all dadaistic experimentation (Feyerabend described
his school of scientific epistemology as "anarchist dada") in sound poetry,
gesture, cut-up, beast languages, etc.--all this was aimed neither at discovering
nor destroying meaning, but at creating it. Nihilism points out gloomily that language "arbitrarily" creates meaning.
Chaos Linguistics happily agrees, but adds that language can overcome language,
that language can create freedom out of semantic tyranny's confusion and
decay.

THE BONNOT GANG WERE vegetarians and drank only water. They came to a bad
(tho' picturesque) end. Vegetables and water, in themselves excellent things--pure
zen really--shouldn't be consumed as martyrdom but as an epiphany. Self-denial
as radical praxis, the Leveller impulse, tastes of millenarian gloom--and
this current on the Left shares an historical wellspring with the neo-puritan
fundamentalism and moralic reaction of our decade. The New Ascesis, whether
practiced by anorexic health-cranks, thin-lipped police sociologists, downtown
straight-edge nihilists, cornpone fascist baptists, socialist torpedoes,
drug-free Republicans...in every case the motive force is the same: resentment.

In the face of contemporary pecksniffian anaesthesia we'll erect a whole
gallery of forebears, heros who carried on the struggle against bad consciousness
but still knew how to party, a genial gene pool, a rare and difficult category
to define, great minds not just for Truth but for the truth of pleasure, serious but not sober, whose sunny disposition makes them not sluggish
but sharp, brilliant but not tormented. Imagine a Nietzsche with good digestion.
Not the tepid Epicureans nor the bloated Sybarites. Sort of a spiritual
hedonism, an actual Path of Pleasure, vision of a good life which is both
noble and possible, rooted in a sense of the magnificent over-abundance of reality.

As for us, He has appointed the job of permanent unemployment.
If he wanted us to work, after all,
He would not have created this wine.
With a skinfull of this, Sir,
would you rush out to commit economics?

--Jalaloddin Rumi, Diwan-e Shams

Here with a Loaf of Bread beneath the Bough,
A flask of Wine, A Book of Verse--and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness--
And Wilderness is Paradise enow.
Ah, my Beloved, fill the cup that clears
To-day of past Regrets and future Fears--Tomorrow?--Why, Tomorrow I may be
Myself with Yesterday's Sev'n Thousand Years.
Ah, Love! could thou and I with Fate conspire
To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire,
Would not we shatter it to bits--and then
Re-mould it nearer to the Heart's Desire!

--Omar FitzGerald

History, materialism, monism, positivism, and all the "isms" of this world
are old and rusty tools which I don't need or mind anymore. My principle
is life, my end is death. I wish to live my life intensely for to embrace
my life tragically.

You are waiting for the revolution? My own began a long time ago! When you
will be ready (God, what an endless wait!) I won't mind going along with
you for awhile. But when you'll stop, I shall continue on my insane and
triumphal way toward the great and sublime conquest of the nothing! Any
society that you build will have its limits. And outside the limits of any
society the unruly and heroic tramps will wander, with their wild & virgin
thoughts--they who cannot live without planning ever new and dreadful outbursts
of rebellion!

I shall be among them!

And after me, as before me, there will be those saying to their fellows:
"So turn to yourselves rather than to your Gods or to your idols. Find what
hides in yourselves; bring it to light; show yourselves!"

Because every person; who, searching his own inwardness, extracts what was
mysteriously hidden therein; is a shadow eclipsing any form of society which
can exist under the sun! All societies tremble when the scornful aristocracy
of the tramps, the inaccessibles, the uniques, the rulers over the ideal,
and the conquerors of the nothing resolutely advances.

So, come on iconoclasts, forward!

"Already the foreboding sky grows dark and silent!"

--Renzo Novatore Arcola, January, 1920

PIRATE RANT

Captain Bellamy

Daniel Defoe, writing under the pen name Captain Charles Johnson, wrote
what became the first standard historical text on pirates, A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pirates. According to Patrick Pringle's Jolly Roger, pirate recruitment was most effective among the unemployed, escaped bondsmen,
and transported criminals. The high seas made for an instantaneous levelling
of class inequalities. Defoe relates that a pirate named Captain Bellamy
made this speech to the captain of a merchant vessel he had taken as a prize.
The captain of the merchant vessel had just declined an invitation to join
the pirates.

I am sorry they won't let you have your sloop again, for I scorn to do any
one a mischief, when it is not to my advantage; damn the sloop, we must
sink her, and she might be of use to you. Though you are a sneaking puppy,
and so are all those who will submit to be governed by laws which rich men
have made for their own security; for the cowardly whelps have not the courage
otherwise to defend what they get by knavery; but damn ye altogether: damn
them for a pack of crafty rascals, and you, who serve them, for a parcel
of hen-hearted numbskulls. They vilify us, the scoundrels do, when there
is only this difference, they rob the poor under the cover of law, forsooth,
and we plunder the rich under the protection of our own courage. Had you
not better make then one of us, than sneak after these villains for employment?

When the captain replied that his conscience would not let him break the
laws of God and man, the pirate Bellamy continued:

You are a devilish conscience rascal, I am a free prince, and I have as
much authority to make war on the whole world, as he who has a hundred sail
of ships at sea, and an army of 100,000 men in the field; and this my conscience
tells me: but there is no arguing with such snivelling puppies, who allow
superiors to kick them about deck at pleasure.

THE DINNER PARTY

The highest type of human society in the existing social order is found
in the parlor. In the elegant and refined reunions of the aristocratic classes
there is none of the impertinent interference of legislation. The Individuality
of each is fully admitted. Intercourse, therefore, is perfectly free. Conversation
is continuous, brilliant, and varied. Groups are formed according to attraction.
They are continuously broken up, and re-formed through the operation of
the same subtile and all-pervading influence. Mutual deference pervades
all classes, and the most perfect harmony, ever yet attained, in complex
human relations, prevails under precisely those circumstances which Legislators
and Statesmen dread as the conditions of inevitable anarchy and confusion.
If there are laws of etiquette at all, they are mere suggestions of principles
admitted into and judged of for himself or herself, by each individual mind.

Is it conceivable that in all the future progress of humanity, with all
the innumerable elements of development which the present age is unfolding,
society generally, and in all its relations, will not attain as high a grade
of perfection as certain portions of society, in certain special relations,
have already attained?

Suppose the intercourse of the parlor to be regulated by specific legislation.
Let the time which each gentleman shall be allowed to speak to each lady
be fixed by law; the position in which they should sit or stand be precisely
regulated; the subjects which they shall be allowed to speak of, and the
tone of voice and accompanying gestures with which each may be treated,
carefully defined, all under pretext of preventing disorder and encroachment
upon each other's privileges and rights, then can any thing be conceived
better calculated or more certain to convert social intercourse into intolerable
slavery and hopeless confusion?